


Miasma

by lilyconrad



Category: Star Wars, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Blood and Gore, Character Death, Dark, Darkfic, Happy Halloween!, Horror, M/M, Murder, Violence, obikin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2019-04-01
Packaged: 2019-08-11 04:57:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 20,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16469201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilyconrad/pseuds/lilyconrad
Summary: Obi-Wan never believed his best friend and lover Anakin would die first. But he has.





	1. Beginnings

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first half of this fic, with the second coming when I have time to finish it. I wanted to get into some horror for Halloween, and hope you enjoy! (Please note the tags.)

“One strong in the Force is like a flower

Whose scent permeates all around it.

 

A bare, empty room becomes fragrant

With the flower’s presence

Its stone walls never knowing

Of the blessing it has received.

 

How beautiful to be made joyous

By a hidden blossom of the Force

Without the ability to understand

The source of one’s delight.”

 

_\- Translated excerpt from “The Second Dawn”, an ancient Jedi tract celebrating the fact that powerful Jedi can unconsciously bring their own inner peace to all sentients who spend time around them, even those without any Force sensitivity._

 

 

 

Anakin Skywalker died on a cool, clear day under lush blue skies, cut down in mid-battle by the impossible: a lucky blaster shot, no different than the countless ones that had rained down on him since the beginning of the war.

There was no heroic death for the one that had seemed destined for such more than anyone else Cody had ever met, clone brother or natural-born alike. No sacrifice made to save his men or his master, no last swell of the Force exploding to obliterate their enemies.

Skywalker was far ahead at the front of the assault, a whirling storm of blue and brown against the distant, jagged lines of enemy tanks, and then the perfect spiral of light wavered and vanished as its owner collapsed out of sight.

Cody blinked, frozen behind the cover he and several other men knelt as he attempted to process what he saw against the constant chatter of positions and situations in his ear through his helmet. Had he imagined it?

_I had to._

It made no sense otherwise. Despite the chaos, how could the battle carry on as if nothing had happened? How could Anakin-karking-Skywalker die like a shinie on his first mission and everything not come to a complete halt?

 _He didn’t. He just jumped out of sight or something_ , he told himself once and then again, trying to connect to General Kenobi through his tightline to confirm Skywalker’s status and getting nothing but rough static.

 _Later. You’ll see the two of them later_ , he reassured himself despite the pit in his stomach. _Focus!_

Cody waved his men onward and jogged along behind them as they peppered enemy droids with loud, whining shots, strangely grateful for all the concentration the battle and coordinating it took. The image of Skywalker toppling in a horribly familiar and boneless slump, saber tumbling away, was not one he wanted to spend any more time on. _It seemed so real. Just like all the others we’ve lost. There and gone. Dead before he hit the ground._

_Maybe I hit my head too hard in that last battle we had to crash land into._

Cody and his brothers fought and bled and pushed forward as this distant world’s sun passed its zenith and began sinking downward, the 501st and 212th hammering at the Separatists until the waves of droids finally broke and the enemy retreated to their ships and scattered into the sky.

Soon all that was left was ugly smears of smoke along the blue just now beginning to deepen to gold and the sounds of the wounded.

The late afternoon light lent a softness to the chaos of the slowing battlefield, to the drifts of wreckage and unnatural angles of metal and white that marked droids and bodies. Exhausted and sitting cross-legged against the still-warm husk of a tank as he ran over clean-up orders with his sargeants, Cody had almost forgotten about the unsettling image of Skywalker until a familiar voice crackled to life in his helmet through Kenobi’s tightline, fighting its way through static.

“Cody?”

He held up his hand, touching the side of his helmet more to let his men know he needed silence than anything else. The voice was so soft it was hard to hear over the random fire of men finishing off broken droids in the distance. “Yes, sir?”

“Have you seen Anakin? Since the battle began?” General Kenobi’s voice was strained: Cody wondered with a twinge of distant concern if he had been wounded, not allowing himself to imagine what else could be the reason.

 _Yes_ , he told himself. Kenobi was always getting injured. Never Skywalker. _Not Skywalker,_ he told himself with a growing unease even as his heart began to pound.

_He’s the luckiest bastard I’ve ever seen and it would take more, a LOT more, to kill him than a blaster-_

“Have you seen Anakin?” Kenobi repeated, voice shaking along the comm link, and Cody stood, walking away from the sargeants.

“Where are you, sir?” It would be good to go check on Kenobi. Himself. _Make sure my general hasn’t gotten himself a concussion or something. He sounds pretty out of it._

 _And Skywalker will come into the med tent like he always does and they’ll give each other hell like they always do_ , Cody told himself as he hurried off to find Kenobi.

 

* * *

 

Obi-Wan stared down at the stained, tattered linen of his sleeves, focused on the dull pain of what would be bruises rising along the skin beneath. He let his mind shift past them, out to the sharper edges of cuts and scrapes lining his body and the cool evening breeze washing across his face as the speeder he rode in rose and fell with the rolling grassy plains around him.

The edge of the capital city they had fought so hard to save rose up from the green like a nightmare, the collection of ugly factories and construction yards a snarl of durasteel clawing at the dusk. _Anakin is somewhere in that maze_ , Obi-Wan thought, nausea rising.

“We’re almost there, sir,” Cody said from the driver’s seat, tapping the comm link on his arm and the two speeder bikes escorting them falling away.

“I can’t feel him.” Obi-Wan looked away, his hand over his mouth. The copper of his own dried blood filled his lungs as he fought to breathe through a surge of horror. “He’s always been there. No matter how far apart we were.”

“I… I’m sorry, sir.”

The stars fell out of sight as they entered the stale gloom of a duracrete tunnel.

He felt Cody touch his shoulder, his hand warm, but the words wouldn’t stop. “He’s there all alone, Cody, and I’m not there with him.”

“I’ll get you to him. I promise. Rex... is with him. Standing guard.”

They emerged into the barren grey of an industrial yard a few minutes later, the gritty smell of chemicals hanging in the night air. This band of the industrial zone was reserved for the worst offenders to wealthy locals no doubt living on the other side of the city: carbonite factories, chemical plants, refineries of every shape and size.

Obi-Wan stared around the vast, empty lot where cargo ships would usually land, puzzled at the long line of Republic barge speeders with their unmoving bags of cargo piled carefully atop each other. _Why bring the dead here?_ he wondered distantly, remembering the usual temples and parks locals often gave over to the fallen.

“We’re here, sir,” Cody said with studied caution as they drew up to one building at the head of the line of barges, waving a muted greeting to the men that saluted as they passed.

The ice of fluorescent lighting and a breeze to match rolled over them as the massive doors opened, and Obi-Wan’s hands curled in his lap at the realization. _Cold storage. For some sort of chemical. More than enough space for all of our dead._

“He is not in there,” Obi-Wan whispered in disbelief, his soul recoiling at the thought of his best friend and lover somewhere in that ghastly maze of bare lights and refrigerated air. “Anakin is not in there. Tell me he isn’t, Cody. Please.”

Cody took a deep breath in a clear struggle for the usual, even tone he always used. “You don’t have to see him tonight, sir. Your gunship crashed, you were unconscious for at least two hours in the wreckage, and you wouldn’t even let the battlefield medic look at you before you… went looking for him. You need to let a medic look at you, sir.”

“Is he in there, Cody?”

“Sir, you’re bruised and bloody and--”

Tears welled up and Obi-Wan’s voice shook, barely audible over the hum of the speeder. “Is he in there, Commander?”

Cody’s back straightened, but he wiped at his own eyes while he continued to stare straight ahead. “Yes. I’m sorry, sir. Yes.”

Obi-Wan let the horrid reality of those words drift through him even as he refused to examine them too closely, shock allowing him just enough strength to get out of the speeder. “Take me to him.”

The walk through the complex was both longer and shorter than Obi-Wan imagined possible. Every trooper they passed gave a Republic salute, the local workers bowing instead, and in the surreal parade Obi-Wan knew he would remember their faces for months, if not years afterward. A clone with a new tattoo along his neck, its red halo bright against his throat as he saluted and pointed the way. A young worker in black who knelt and bowed all the way over in thanks before getting up with grey smudges on his knees to turn back to the grim work of the night.

 _These are the last people I will see, the last memories I will have, of a world where I have not seen Anakin dead_ , Obi-Wan thought to himself with a cold, terrible certainty. The sound of his feet on the bare floor, the astringent tang of cleaners, the way the light caught on Cody’s armor as he led the way: every unforgiving detail would be there in his mind, he knew. _For years to come. For the rest of my life._

The path led into a massive room the size of a hangar, the air now so cold Obi-Wan went to tug his robe closer before he remembered he never wore one into battle.

The place was chaos, not the solemn quiet he had half-imagined it would be this far back. Men were off-loading bodies into separate, smaller rooms, floating gurneys pushed back and forth in a sea of grey and green bags, soldiers calling orders out. Those closest to Obi-Wan and Cody saluted immediately but did not pause in their work when they caught sight of them, and Cody gave a quiet order into one man’s ear that spread quickly through the rest around them.

Soldiers in yellow fell in around and behind them with gurneys and hover-carts of shrouded bodies piled high, a wordless escort meant to keep them out of sight from the rest of the bay, and Obi-Wan felt a flicker of desperate, aching affection for Cody walking just ahead of him.

They passed through a door into a much smaller chamber, and all gratitude, all hope, all light in Obi-Wan’s world fell away.

Anakin lay on a gurney in the center of the room, body bags piled up on others lining the walls like grim offerings. The gold of his halo in the Force, that endless and fascinating warmth constantly shifting around him, was gone. He bore it no more than the barren duracrete walls rising around him _._

There was no sign it had ever existed.

There was only the body of a young man now, the lazy curls of his hair no different but now cruel in the way they framed the cold truth of his closed eyes and pale skin.

_He is dead. My beautiful boy is dead._

Obi-Wan took a step forward, aware of a faint, breathless howl coming from deep within his chest and that Cody and Rex-- _Rex is here? Has he been here since we came in?_ \-- had reached out to steady him. Sinking into their warm grip, he took one leaden step and then another, unable to look away from Anakin.

Someone had folded Anakin’s left hand over his stomach, a clone gesture of respect. _Shield brother. One who died protecting others._

Rage shot through him, blind and vicious, fury that someone as bright and beautiful and full of light as Anakin lay here dead while others lived. _Worthless, pathetic little creatures who will wake tomorrow and go about their meaningless day while my dear one burns on a pyre outside of their precious little city. Separatists. Politicians. All of them._

_They did not deserve a single drop of your blood, Anakin! Not one!_

Someone was whispering to him to breathe, warm puffs of air on his cheek and the sight of Anakin replaced by armor and black. There was fear in that voice, carefully hidden but there nonetheless, and he realized he had collapsed where he stood, Cody kneeling with him and pulling him into a tight hug.

“Breathe, General, breathe…”

The room was shaking.

Not the room, exactly. But the lights were swinging on their dusty cords overhead as if in an earthquake, shadows jumping back and forth while the gurneys shivered, clacking against each other along the walls.

Only Anakin’s gurney lay still, as motionless as the body atop it.

_I will never again watch him tinker with his droids._

_I will never again straighten his collars._

_I will never again lie next to him in the dark._

Obi-Wan watched the light over Anakin sway, watched the harsh shadows sweep over his pale face and fall away again, and in that moment something gave way inside of his soul.

Every lamp overhead shuddered back into place all at once to a hiss of snapping fuses. Darkness swept through the room, the shadows over the stacked bodies and Anakin black and fathomless against the few remaining lights left.

“I want them dead,” Obi-Wan hissed, looking up through the gloom into Cody’s face and then to Rex standing worried behind him. “Do you hear me? Every single Separatist. Dead.”

The only thing that mattered in that moment was their agreement, and Obi-Wan stared hard at them, aware even in his madness of how Cody’s arms grew still around him and Rex took a step back. _Do not defy me_ , he thought. Or whispered.

He wasn’t sure which he had done, but it didn’t matter. They both nodded as one, the silence of the darkened room unbroken, and then they were lifting him, moving him away from Anakin.

“No,” he muttered in a cold, white gasp of air, but fell silent when he realized they were taking him toward the far wall of the room, not back out into the crowd. There was a door, and they passed through into warmth, a long and narrow room with a cot set amid a wide expanse of control boards.

“You can stay here, sir,” Cody whispered as Rex closed the door and shut out the terrible sight of all of the bodies left in the gloom and the icy air circulating around them. “The workers know to stay home until we ship out. No one should bother you here.”

Obi-Wan looked around with dull eyes out of habit more than anything else, battle instincts forcing him to locate all the exits before he allowed himself to sit on the padded length of the cot.

There was the door they had come through, then two more doors across the room that a long, single window showed led out onto a huge, empty space and various walkways leading up and down. Carbonite pits lay steaming below in a vision of the hell so many cultures believed in, white fog pouring out and whatever was inside them hidden by clouds that ghosted along the grated metal flooring. A few skeleton crew wandered like ghosts in the mist, making sure nothing had been left at an unstable stage.

Rex was talking to him. Or maybe it was Cody. They were both bright sparks in the Force, like all of the clones, each flame as individual a signature as that of any natural-born sentient, but at the moment Obi-Wan could not feel anything but the ice spreading through his own soul.

“-- will have our long-distance comm fixed within 72 hours, sir. We’ll need to make a full report to the Council then. Or, or I can if you don’t feel up to it.”

_Cody, then._

“Go away,” he whispered, raking his hand through his beard, fingers catching on small, matted lumps of dried blood. Anakin had run his fingers through his beard that morning before they had gone their separate ways for the day, and Obi-Wan fought back the urge to scream at the memory of his lover’s blue eyes close and soft with affection.

“Can we get you anything, sir? Do you want one of us to stay with you?”

“No. Wait.” Without looking at them he motioned vaguely toward the other room. “No more bringing bodies in there. No one gets to come in and… and stare at him.”

“Yes, sir. I was going to, ah, keep watch next to him but, if you like, would you rather I stayed outside the entrance? Keep others away?” _Rex._

“Yes. I… I will stay with him tonight.”

“Understood, sir.”

One of them squeezed his shoulder while the other promised to bring him food in the morning. He said nothing, and finally the door back out into the awful place where Anakin lay in shadow opened and closed in a swirl of refrigerated air.

When Obi-Wan was sure he was alone, he bowed his head and wept into his hands, raw and ragged breaths lost in the hum of the machinery in the next room over. It went on and on without mercy, working to keep Anakin and his escort of fallen clones perfect mockeries of what they once had been.

 

* * *

 

When they were back out in the main hangar facing the crowd, Cody turned toward Rex, watching his friend place his helmet back on with shaking hands and straighten up for the ceremonial watch over his fallen leader.

 _It’s not just Skywalker’s death,_ he thought to himself as he squeezed Rex’s arm and set off with a grim determination to handle the meaningless yet vital logistics of the cremation of so many men. _He saw it too. He felt it._

In that moment when the lights had snapped overhead, a cold and brittle plunge into twilight, Kenobi had fixed them both with strange eyes. Cody at first thought it was a trick of the scattered light, that such an unnatural gold was not possible, but the color had remained: fascinating, terrifying, not allowing Cody to look anywhere else.

A rage had overcome Cody, a vision of worlds awash in fire and the black scoring of blaster marks. A tidal wave of death, spilling through the galaxy in the beautiful and horrific blooms of ordnance detonating across a hundred different worlds. It was heady and insane and it had called to him, to the innate part of him designed to crave battle, and it had taken every bit of his strength to break free of the bleak, entrancing power of that image and get Kenobi back on his feet. The vision faded when he did, the cold air of the room returning, but the adrenaline remained, the sense that it was right and just to want revenge for the death of Skywalker.

_Rex wants the same. I know he does._

_And it’s normal to want that_ , Cody reassured himself, calling out orders as he waded back into the crowd. _To want to wipe those bastards off the map for what they’ve done to our brothers. And to Skywalker. And to Kenobi._

_Nothing wrong with giving them what they deserve._

He thought of Kenobi slumped on the cot in the control room, broken and alone, and the bloodlust rose anew. _Nothing wrong with that at all._

 

* * *

 

Rex stood guard for the next two days outside of the makeshift morgue Skywalker lay in, brothers from the 501st coming to stand with him the moment they were off duty and not leaving until their short rest cycles were over. There were men he knew well, hardened veterans he didn’t, shinies with armor barely scuffed. By the second day, men from the 212th had joined them, a scattering of dull yellow against blue, all of them standing in a rotating honor guard for the man lying inside.

 _I failed you, sir_ , was all Rex could think, for hours on end, grief raw and brutal. _I failed you. You weren’t supposed to die first._

Anger would come and go in violent flares, stiffening his back, reminding him of the strange, guilty fantasy he had found himself in during that awful, frightening moment with Kenobi when the general had been shown to Skywalker’s body.

_For just a second, I was running along a battlefield filled with smoke, shooting everything in sight. Clankers, Separatist soldiers, even the civvies who couldn’t get out of my way fast enough._

The vicious joy that image had brought him worried him, but there was too much else crowding his mind, too much anguish to focus on it for more than a little while before other thoughts pushed it out.

Cody was the only one he could think to talk to about it, and Rex knew Cody had his own problems looming over him.

Kenobi was losing his grip.

As the head of the honor guard, Rex stood his watch alone directly in front of the doors. No one else stood close enough to hear the occasional faint, muffled sound of Kenobi’s sobs and howls over the unending din of the rest of the complex.

Only Cody came and went into the room beyond a few times, taking in food that he brought back out later untouched, the worried clench of his jaw confirming what Rex suspected.

Rex had watched men die all through his career with the 501st, some instantly and some in ways that still troubled his sleep. It was part of war, part of what he had been taught since he was old enough to form words. None of that took away from the grief he felt at the loss of every man he commanded, but it was something as familiar as the weight of his pistols against him.

Only 73% of CT infantry men would survive to their second mission, and 44% of them to their third mission and beyond: the numbers remained grim throughout a trooper’s life until the mythical witch of the dead finally caught up to him. No amount of skill or strength or intelligence would save you: sooner or later you would die. And your brother. And his brother.

The old crone took everyone eventually. Rex knew that, accepted that his own death would come one day just as it would for all of those around him.

And perhaps, he thought, perhaps Kenobi had fooled himself into thinking he had accepted it too.

Cody had told him once, on a quiet night in hyperspace, that Kenobi had lost his own master in a duel with something called a Sith, some kind of monster that Kenobi had gone on to kill in the same fight.

But when the doors finally opened on the second night to begin the mass funeral, Rex knew even that lesson had not been enough for Kenobi to fully understand the cruelties of war.

Kenobi stood in the entrance, disheveled and dirty, tugging on his hood with clumsy hands while he stared in shock at the ground. Rex felt a bittersweet admiration as Kenobi managed to pull his robe close around him to hide the battle grit and grime still staining his clothes. _As lost as he is, he will not let Skywalker go alone to the fire._

“He is ready,” Kenobi whispered from the shadows of his hood.

“You are brave to walk beside him,” Rex said, as he had to so many brothers escorting the fallen, but had to pause and swallow before he could finish the ritual question. “May I walk with you?”

“Yes.”

Rex saluted, the men around him doing the same, and the slow, gruesome parade of men and bodies began, a stream of hoverlifts and carts bearing the dead from the maze of buildings that had held them until now.

Cody was waiting at the front of the building and fell in line beside Rex, behind Kenobi and the small hover-lift drifting next to him that bore a sealed body bag draped in the familiar dark brown of Skywalker’s robe. That was the only distinction between the fallen general and the body bags of the dead borne along behind him, that drape of linen across the crackled black synthweave of the bag, and Rex fought another pang of anger deep within his chest that a friend like Skywalker, so like a clone brother, was gone.

At the end of their long, stilted walk under a sky filled with stars and the crescent of a red moon, Rex closed his eyes, unable to watch as they threw Skywalker’s bag on the monstrous fire dancing before them, the highest ranking of the dead always sent first to meet the witch so he could ask her to bless the men that came after.

When he opened them, Kenobi had sunk into Cody’s arms, shoulders shaking, and he quickly stepped over to help Cody move the general into the dark nearby. The three of them sat together on the back of a grounded landspeeder, no words exchanged but a dull grief sharp in the air, and watched the fire consume an endless stream of anonymous body bags long into the night.

 

* * *

 

Night drifted into morning, Republic supply and troop ships rumbling up into the pale, washed out sky, and Cody found a number rattling in his head louder than the engines around him as they left the smell of charred wood and chemicals behind.

_Fifteen._

A small section of Article 15, in particular, from the Grand Army of the Republic Military Code, the entirety of which all Clone commanders had learned as part of their advanced training. Cody had never expected to think about this rule, the words just another long string in many he had been called upon to recite during his classes.

_Article Fifteen, Subsection Ten, Sublisting A: Removals Unrelated to Misconduct._

_Officers must, upon observation and evidence of continued unsuitability of a superior officer, decide whether the superior officer has become untenable in his post and, if so, remove him from command immediately. No court martial will be held if the removal arises from circumstances that do not reflect any potential discredit on the superior officer._

Cody shifted in his seat, guilt rising, but across the aisle Kenobi did not move or look at him, staring out the window at the other ships rising around them, all of them on their way back to the massive bulks of the _Negotiator_ and _Resolute_ far overhead.

Kenobi had still refused to shower or allow a medic to see him, the smell of smoke and sweat acrid around him: dark circles lay heavy under his eyes, his clothes rumpled, and his hands shook in his lap. He had not said a word since the funeral, and Cody and Rex had been left to run interference as best they could, organizing their battalions’ return to space without letting anyone but their closest, most trusted men see what had become of Kenobi.

 _No court martial, no punishment. I report Kenobi according to Article Fifteen during the full report to the Council tomorrow, and they’ll have an escort sent out to return him to the Temple and get him the help he needs_ , Cody tried to tell himself, rubbing his forehead in an effort to fight off the headache that had lingered for the last day.

_I know it’s right, that I should do it not only as an officer but as a friend. So why doesn’t it feel that way?_

The lingering sense of guilt remained, and he had never been so relieved to see the _Negotiator_ damaged as they rose back into the black of space. The command ship had taken heavy fire in certain sections and the faint, tiny glint of repair droids and men in space suits could be seen scuttling along its massive surface.

Repairs meant they would all be busy. Cody would have no time to think about what it would mean to lose Kenobi, what it had meant to lose Skywalker, and the 212th would be unable to take on a mission for at least a few weeks. At this point, they would be able to linger long enough to see which Jedi the Council sent out to replace Skywalker as head of the 501st.

 _And time to let Kenobi rest and get used to the idea of going back_ , he tried to reassure himself _. We can even tuck him away somewhere quiet, since it looks like the decks the officer quarters were in aren’t going to be operational for a while._

Kenobi donned his hood once more as the ship landed, a silent ghost behind Cody as he led him through the corridors. Cody checked a data pad a subordinate handed him almost immediately before disappearing again, not asking anything in case Kenobi’s voice started to shake in front of the troopers and techs hurrying back and forth.

“Why are you taking me to the war room?” Kenobi asked a long stretch of minutes and walking later when they were alone.

Cody pointed down the hall, willing himself to be calm at the weak, lost quality of Kenobi’s voice, at the sight of the hooded, slumped man behind him. “Guest officer quarters, sir. The ones just down from the war room.” He held up the data pad, careful to keep his voice quiet and understanding. “The officer decks are just now getting atmosphere and climate back from the sound of things. It’ll be weeks before we get lights up and all the repairs done. The long-range comm is up and working, though. The Council wants a full debriefing standard oh-nine-hundred hours tomorrow.”

“I see,” Kenobi murmured, lapsing back into silence as they reached the first room in a half-dozen lined up neatly along the hall.

Cody opened the door, struggling to find something to say that would lessen his friend’s pain, even if only for a moment, but nothing would come out and he watched Kenobi walk into the room and wave the door shut without looking back, unaware of the dirt and grime on his clothes and hands and the matted blood dried to brown in his hair.

 _I am sorry, Obi-Wan_ , Cody thought, resting his hand on the door and bowing his head for a moment, black gloved fingers splayed across the white. _Skywalker didn’t deserve to die, and after all the good you’ve done, all the people you’ve helped, you didn’t deserve to lose him._

 

* * *

 

Rex tried to focus on the wavering lines of the holo in front of him, the miniature versions of the Jedi Council Masters as unsteady as candle flames. This far out on the edge of known space, it was a miracle even this came through. It could have been a tactic of the Separatists to get them this far from home, but Rex couldn’t think through that possibility at the moment.

He had seen the hand sign Cody had made with his hands clasped at attention behind his back, already talking to the Council when Rex had come in: the letter A and the number 15. The two of them had worked and fought together in tandem for so long, no further explanation was needed.

 _He’s going to report Kenobi_ , he repeated to himself, wondering with unease if the Council could hear their thoughts. Losing Skywalker had been a shock, brutal and unexpected, and now Cody, his best friend, had no choice but to have his own general removed from command.

 _There is no other choice_ , Rex told himself at the recollection of Kenobi dirty and disheveled, so unlike the brave, clever man he knew. But the words felt hollow and he twisted his own hands behind his back, fighting back anger. _It isn’t fair to lose both Skywalker and Kenobi. They didn’t come from Kamino, but they are still_ vod _. They are still our battle brothers. Why did this happen?!_

He stood taller and took a deep breath as he came to stand next to Cody, Cody explaining the details of the battle and repairs underway, throwing in things Rex knew sounded important but were really just a way to stall the inevitable.

The Council knew of Skywalker’s death from an emergency signal forced through ancient arrays this far out on the Outer Rim the day of the battle, but they knew nothing beyond that, and the topic sat heavy and terrible over the entire conversation until Master Yoda cleared his throat, the static fuzzing out the sound for a moment.

“Our condolences to you and your men on the death of Knight Skywalker,” Master Yoda nodded to Rex in a shimmer of blue. “A great loss to the Order and a greater loss to those who knew him this is.”

“Sir,” Rex nodded, aware of the shift in Cody’s shoulders and the deep breath he took. _Here it comes. The end of this. Of the four of us._

“Good morning,” a quiet, calm voice interrupted from behind them.

Rex turned as Cody did, unable to understand what he was seeing and glad in the back of his mind that the two of them had turned away from the holo, no matter how poor in quality the feed was.

Kenobi stood there, showered and clean, in fresh clothes, the only sign Skywalker would not immediately walk in behind him the dark circles under his eyes.

“Good morning, sir,” Cody said automatically in response, Rex too stunned to do anything more than step back with Cody as Kenobi walked up to the holo, hands folded inside his sleeves.

“I apologize for being late to the debriefing, Masters,” Kenobi said, bowing his head with the same formal, crisp tilt he always did. “I was meditating long into the night.”

Rex swallowed, exchanging the quickest of glances with Cody before they turned back to face the holo. Kenobi sounded like he always did after a long campaign: a thread of weariness in his tone but as impassive as always.

Cody said nothing as the Council spoke in kind, sympathetic tones and Kenobi answered with only a hint of sadness in return, and Rex knew there would be no report and no replacement of yet another general.

 _Good_ , Rex found himself thinking while knowing it was wrong at the same time. _Kenobi should stay. He should stay._

And through the rest of the debriefing, talk sliding into reports of Count Dooku hiding in a nearby system even further out, that thought repeated in Rex’s head over and over again until he could think of nothing else, dimly aware of Cody’s own eyes becoming unfocused and his hands kneading each other behind his back.

When the debriefing ended and the holo snapped off, the reception so bad it took a moment to realize the jittering images would not return, Cody spoke first as Kenobi turned to both of them.

“What are your orders, sir?”

Kenobi tilted his head, taking in both of them with cold blue eyes. “On to the coordinates the Temple has sent us. We remain here in the Outer Rim until we find the hole Count Dooku has crawled into.”

“Yes, sir.”

With a nod, Kenobi shifted his unnerving gaze to Rex, voice as sure as it had ever been. “Captain, in this unusual circumstance given how far we are from home and the likely extended time we will be out here, I will put in a formal request tomorrow to merge the 212th and 501st under my command for the foreseeable future. The Council has admitted it will take them some time to find a new general, and that is time we do not have. As the highest ranking officer of the 501st on board and therefore the current commanding officer of the 501st, do you have any objection to this plan of action?”

 _Yes. Yes!_ Rex wanted to hiss, and yet there was something soothing in the ice of Kenobi’s tone. The promise of revenge for what had happened to Skywalker, a promise of blood and fire and death, and his resistance to the idea faded.

The image from the night Skywalker died surged through him once again, the idea of running across a battlefield shooting everything that stood in his way, and both nausea and euphoria shivered through him. “No sir. No objections at all. The 501st is yours.”

 

* * *

 

Weeks passed.

Weeks of strange things on the _Negotiator_ Cody found himself overlooking.

The day after Kenobi received permission to merge the battalions, he told Cody and Rex to prepare the troops for a full invasion of the planet Dooku was said to be hiding on, and then took up residence in the half-repaired ruins of one of the old officers’ decks as soon as gravity and climate were restored. The techs were sent out with their work unfinished, puzzled but soon on to more of the seemingly endless repairs both it and the _Resolute_ needed.

Kenobi disappeared into the ruined maze colored dim amber by emergency lighting and did not reappear for some time, comming in what he wanted at odd hours to Cody.

Grief was a strange thing, Cody told himself. Kenobi wanted to be alone, and as long as he sent the bare minimum of orders to keep the combined battalions running, Cody had no reason to pursue him into the half-lit corridors and frozen doors yawning into black rooms.

The orders were brief but specific, some more interesting than others: Send in trusted and high-clearance technicians to make sure the small hangar bay that connected to that particular deck was in operation. Have an equally trusted pilot move a gunship-class stealth ship from the main hangar to the small one.

A week later, this was followed by an order to send a few ARC troopers Cody trusted in the middle of the night for a briefing. Finally, Kenobi requested two specific, supply crates left over from their last battle delivered from the main hangar to the emergency one: crates marked as weapons and explosives, half the size of a gunship each if lighter for the combat they had helped supply.

It was easy enough to see what Kenobi’s plan was, and Cody was careful to look the other way when they finally arrived in orbit over the swirl of white and grey clouds of the remote, apparently empty planet the Temple had pointed them to.

There would be no battle against any of Dooku’s hidden ground forces, despite the show of preparation for one and the newly repaired command ships Kenobi commanded. The count’s capture would be done with a precise ruthlessness Skywalker was no longer there to prevent Kenobi from sinking into. Five men, six if Kenobi went, down to the planet and back while the rest of the ship lay quiet in the main rest cycle and the enemy waited for an attack that would not come.

Cody passed the word quietly through the command deck to look the other way as well, and beyond a quick wish for luck nothing was relayed to the small ship when it called in a departure and vanished down into the orbit of the planet.

A strange disappointment came over Cody that he would not be able to lead a full frontal assault this time, and he shook his head to clear it of the image and the excitement it stirred.

Fives and the other men he had chosen excelled at this sort of work, and it was their turn to take a shot for Skywalker. They were gone for less than a day and back again, vanished into the hangar on the half-repaired deck. _Back into the deck that no one but Kenobi has access to now_.

That wasn’t quite right, Cody corrected himself as soon as he thought it. Anyone could go in if they could get the doors to work, but the repair work had been rushed and it seemed that most of the time they only opened for Kenobi. Cody thought of the flicker of half-powered lights and shadows lying thick along the halls behind Kenobi whenever Cody visited him for a briefing.

Kenobi never called him to come any further inside the gloom than that first doorway and Cody never pushed to do so. _I trust you, sir_ , he told himself more than once. _Whatever you’re doing in there, you know best._

Fives and his men reemerged the following day for their debriefing, strangely quiet and pale as they stood before Cody in the war room. None had any injuries that Cody could see, but he sent the four subordinates off to Kix to be checked out anyway, leaving him and Fives alone. The room was filled with the soft hiss of radiation coming from the planet’s atmosphere, audible through the spy tech they had deployed to monitor Separatist transmissions.

Cody clicked it off, the toneless white noise vanishing, and slid his hand over to also click off the recorder that they normally used for debriefings.

He tilted his head as Fives stared down at the smooth black of the command display. “What happened?”

Fives slid his hand down his chest as if across the blaster sling he sometimes carried, an old nervous habit from their rookie days.

“Fives!” _Did they not get him? Did Dooku escape?_

His friend inhaled slowly and then let it out, tapping the chest plate as if to bring his focus back to the moment. “Sorry, I just…” He trailed off, running his hand over his mouth.

“Did Dooku get away?”

Fives gave a short, unsteady laugh into his hand, shaking his head. “No.”

“Where is he?”

“The General, no, before that, I mean… We got into the suite of rooms Dooku was staying in, stunned him, gagged him, put him in Force binders. Textbook opening of an extraction. And then--” Fives looked away, trying to put whatever he had seen into words.

“And then Kenobi grabbed him by the hair and did… something. Something in the Force. Even I could feel it. We all could. Dooku, he, he started shaking where he was kneeling. Really shaking. Kenobi didn’t let go. Blood started coming out of his nose. Dooku’s nose.”

 _Article 12, Subsection 8, F._ Cody almost said aloud. _Torture of captured enemy combatants is forbidden in any and all circumstances._

But he didn’t say anything. And neither did Fives. There was only the cool silence of the room and the slowing of Fives’ tapping against his chest as he searched for more words.

“What happened then?”

“The General, he, uh, he said something to himself. Not to us. ‘I should have known it was him,’ or something like that. I’m not sure.”

“Fives,” Cody said, chest tight as he made himself continue. “You were the top of your class at retention and recall. Don’t tell me you don’t know what he said.”

Fives’ gaze snapped back to him, as sharp as his voice was soft. “I don’t, because right after Kenobi said it, he killed Dooku. Lit his saber and cut him into a dozen pieces right there on the spot. It, it smelled awful, and he just kept hacking at him and Dooku kept trying to scream through the gag until Kenobi took half his skull off down the middle.”

Cody knew what Fives would say next, his gut turning even as a thrill shot through him. “You didn’t try to stop him, did you?”

“No. None of us did. It felt…”

“Right.”

“Yeah.” Fives scrubbed at his hair, that distant look back again. “It felt… I don’t know. Good. It’s not, though. Is it? That isn’t supposed to happen. That sort of thing. Even if it is a bastard like Dooku.”

He gave another laugh of frightened disbelief that shook along the edges. “We fed him down an incinerator chute in the suite before we left, one piece at a time. Bet Dooku never thought he’d be going out the same way all his garbage did.”

“Who knows Dooku is dead?”

“No one on the Seppie side. Kenobi used Dooku’s handprint and logged into a datapad on the table. Typed a message as “Dooku” saying he was off on a secret trip and not to let the word out.”

“So just you and the boys?”

Fives shook his head in a daze. “No. Just me. Kenobi said they were good men, the boys you picked, but that I was the only one on the mission he could really trust. So he fixed it so they wouldn’t even remember finding him. It’s not easy to do with us, you know, but he did. And that’s good, I think. I do.”

He nodded, tracing his hand along the imaginary holster sling again, staring off at nothing. “I don’t think that’s something they would want to remember.”

 

* * *

 

What Fives had said didn’t make any sense, and it sat on Cody’s shoulders heavy and grim as he squeezed the back of Fives’ neck in a gesture of reassurance and sent him off to rest.

It was hard to picture Kenobi like that: violent, unhinged. It was even harder to understand why Kenobi had wanted to keep Dooku’s death a secret. _The news of the death of the leader of the CIS would be a huge blow to their morale. It could be a huge step toward winning the war._

Cody leaned over the smooth, cold glass of the console, hands tight on the edges, and studied his reflection in it. _I should talk to the Council about this next time we report in. Put in a preliminary report now for them to review since the comm signal’s been so poor lately. Give them time to look at it before we try to talk through all the static._

He jabbed at the screen, entering his own access code, and his own face vanished in squares of light that snapped up from the black. It was a simple process to send a coded message, one he had done a hundred times before, and he clicked through to an open screen.

The blank space glared up at him, and he tried to imagine what he would write, guilt and a strange sense of disappointment in himself creeping in.

 _Is there a reason to tell them? What if they already know?_ he wondered, fingers pausing over the keys. Without his glove his hand looked sickly, a little pale, the veins more prominent, and he turned his hand over, fascinated. _Must be the light from the board._

He clenched and unclenched his fist, resting his hand back on the side of the console. _Dooku deserved to die, and whatever secret operation this is I would endanger it by sending a message, even if it is encrypted._

_Kenobi has to have a good reason for keeping it secret._

_I’ll just go talk to him. That’s all I need to do. Maybe the plan is to release news of Dooku’s death once we’re safely back in the Mid Rim at least. Or back to Coruscant._

Cody shut the message window and logged out, leaving the mission debriefing summary blank for later.

 

* * *

 

On his way down to Kenobi, he happened to enter the same lift as Kix. “You look like kajj, brother,” Cody said with a hollow grin. “We haven’t even had a battle yet and you look like you haven’t slept in days.”

Kix shrugged. “No time for beauty sleep. I’ve got wounded to patch up.”

Cody frowned. “What? Did some of the boys try to leave the medbay too soon?” There were reports of that happening more often than usual: brothers declaring themselves ready to fight when they couldn’t even walk yet. It was stupid but it made Cody proud in a way, that his brothers were stubborn, tough bastards.

“No,” Kix sighed, running his hand through the fine stubble of his hair. “A few of them, well, their sutures were done on the battlefield. Rushed. Not very good work.”

“At least they lived.”

“Yeah. And I just want to help them get better.” He nodded, almost to himself. “That’s what I do.”

“I know, Kix,” Cody told him, patting his back. “But you need your rest. Let the medbay docs handle it.”

“I will, as soon as I’m done with my last visit. Huge gashes on his chest from shrapnel in the battle. Saw him a little while ago and promised I’d fix him up before I finished today. Going to cut open those sutures and redo them like they should be.”

“Giving sedative time to kick in before you go see him?”

Kix studied the doorframe of the elevator, thoughtful. “No, he wants to be awake for it. No painkiller. Nothing. Says the pain will make him stronger. Says it makes us all stronger.”

Both of them nodded with a hazy, shared rush of pride. _Tough bastards, all of us, even if we did lose Skywalker,_ Cody thought to himself as the lift stopped and Kix walked out into the antiseptic fog of the main medbay deck. _Through strength we gain power._


	2. Dreams

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a shorter update but the flow seemed to work stopping here. This is going to be three chapters in all, it looks like. Possibly four? Hope you like it and thank you for all the comments and kudos so far!

The lift slid to a halt a few minutes later but the doors remained closed, the control panel a dull red to signal a restricted deck. Cody tapped in a code and the lift opened onto the gloom of Deck 37, the blackness interrupted only by lonely islands of amber emergency lighting up and down the hallway.

He stepped out and the lift closed, leaving him alone in the dim passage. The techs had sealed off both ends of the hallway with metal grating and warning signs, leaving only a set of doors directly in front of him that led further into the deck.

There were more doors to either side before the hallway ran out, but they had never worked when Cody came down, so he no longer spent any time thinking about them. He punched in a quick signal on his comm to Kenobi, letting him know he was there, and cleared his throat as he waited, the sound harsh in the empty corridor.

Just as he had started to wonder if Kenobi was asleep, the doors hissed open to reveal the black passage beyond them and a glint of strange golden eyes in the dark. “Hello, Cody,” Kenobi whispered. “Why have you come to see me?”

“Sir, I...” Cody answered, struggling to find words that didn’t vanish into the piercing gaze fixing him on the spot _._ “You… you killed Dooku.”

“Ah, so Fives told you.”

“He did.”

“I thought he might. He should. You should know, I think. You and Captain Rex. My most trusted men.”

Cody tried to remember why he had come. “You killed Dooku, sir.”

“Yes,” came the reply, low and unreadable. “Tell me, Cody, how does that make you feel? Knowing the man responsible for so much suffering is dead?”

“I… I don’t know.”

“Are you sure, Cody?’

“Why did you hide it? We could--” _Focus, you idiot shinie!_ “-- we could end the war with news like that.”

Kenobi studied him from the shadows for a long time before he answered. “We could. Tell me, Cody, do you want the war to end?”

“I…” Cody’s first instinct was to nod, but he froze instead as the question ground to a halt over his heart.

“When the war is over, what will there be for you? For the brothers? Charity missions? Disaster relief response?” Kenobi’s voice was soft in the dark, his tone somewhere between sympathy and anger. “Perhaps serving as ceremonial guards at the Senate with nothing to do but watch politicians twist words all day? Until your lives end long before they should?”

“We will go where we are needed,” Cody said, the words automatic from thousands of repetitions in his training, but his uncertain tone gave away the disappointment such images brought and his shock at Kenobi bringing up the open secret of their aging rate.

“Hmm,” Kenobi said almost to himself. “The galaxy’s fiercest warriors, cursed once with shortened lives by their very own makers, and cursed again to live those lives out humble and meek as the flock they protect?”

“Sir…” Cody growled before he could stop himself, surprised at how much bitterness welled up at Kenobi’s question. “A man can’t change his fate.”

“Can’t he? I saw... things in Dooku’s mind, Cody, when I stripped away his shields, when he gave into his pain before the end. Some things I understood immediately. Some things I still need time to process.” Kenobi reached out and squeezed Cody’s arm, nodding and voice gentle once again. “You will give me that time, won’t you? Do you still trust me?”

“Yes, sir,” he answered, relieved to be back on familiar ground. _That is true. That will always be true, sir._

“Good. Have us retreat to the Daenva Cluster further out. We will target that group of Separatist outposts intelligence told us about some time ago. But most importantly, I want no interruptions from Coruscant while I meditate on what I have seen.”

“Very good, sir.”

“And send Fives back to me once he has slept, please. I have seen that I will need him for another mission. Captain Rex as well. You will lead the Daenva battles, and cover for the three of us if we remain out of sight for a time.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thank you, Cody.” Kenobi stepped back, now invisible in the darkness but his voice low and soothing. “It is of the utmost importance this is not discussed among anyone, even the three of you, at any time. Please separately tell Rex and then Fives that I wish to see him and that I will explain once he is here.”

“Understood.” _Kenobi is fine. We are fine. He has a plan. He always has a plan. I’m glad I talked to him first,_ Cody thought to himself, reassured and a bit ashamed as he nodded and turned to go. _There’s no reason to contact the Council_ , he repeated to himself. _No reason at all._

 

* * *

 

Time blurred into the destruction of one Separatist base after another along the furthest edges of the Outer Rim, Rex and his men dropping into one battle after another. It was exhausting, but rather than the battalions suffering fatigue there was a strange, manic energy rising among the soldiers despite the time they had been away from home.

The swell of battlelust began to rise after the string of Daenva missions, around the time their last main comm with Coruscant died. The other had been irreparably damaged during the fight Skywalker had died in, but General Kenobi had everything under control, he had reassured them all at a mass assembly following the outage.

He was communicating with the Council through the Force, and the Council wanted them marching onward, fighting against the Separatists until they were recalled. They would scavenge food and supplies as needed from the bases they took.

The Chancellor was missing, he told them all, and rumors said Count Dooku was as well. It would be total war from here on out, with every fleet left to its own devices until leadership could be found on either side.

They were on their own here in the wastes of the Outer Rim, the only Republic ships strong enough to continue the fight so far from home, Kenobi said.

And they would rain hell down on any Separatist unfortunate enough to be their target.

The clone brothers had agreed to a one with their new mission, saluting proudly to the hooded man standing over them in the vast hangar bay. Many said it was dreams of a red light that had convinced them, dreams that had crept in like fog through all of the barracks over the weeks and months that followed that fateful day Skywalker had fallen.

The dream was almost the same for everyone, though it came later for some than others. Nothing but a blood-red light, filling the dreamer’s field of vision, harsh and unforgiving. Some said it was a sun from some place like the planet of the witches. A few said it was a jewel, the light shaped like a rectangle.

Everyone agreed you couldn’t look away.

It was a terrifying dream and yet all the brothers considered it good luck when one of them had it before a battle. The man fortunate enough to have it woke up with fresh determination, with a renewed certainty in his purpose and the purpose of all the brothers. The dreamer’s squadmates and others would come to him to get a thin line of red paint traced down the right side of their helmets for luck.

No one knew where the idea came from, but it felt right. The light in the dream was connected to Skywalker, somehow. They were all sure of it, and they called for him to reach out from beyond the fire to bring luck to them in their hour of need. But the red light was not the fire Skywalker had gone to. That was accepted across both ships as well without question, though no one remembered agreeing upon this idea either.

Rex had the dream more than most, more than he revealed to anyone. But it was not the most disturbing one he had. That dubious honor went to another recurring one he could not shake.

He was in someone else's clothes, hidden in a drape of heavy fabric, following Kenobi through the empty wreck of a hangar bay. The roof lay torn open to reveal ruddy skies and smog thick and heavy overhead. _No, we’re not following Kenobi. We’re escorting him somewhere._

Fives was next to him, he knew somehow, even though he was hidden beneath the same type of angular helmet Rex was wearing.

Up ahead, a man waited for them by the sleek lines of a small personal ship made long after this bay had been abandoned to the elements. _Civilian class transport vessel, 094-1 Series,_ Rex thought every time he had the dream. _Low_ _passenger capacity but h_ _yperdrive standard._

They passed into the patchwork shade cast by the massive arch of the roof overhead and Kenobi came to a stop. The three of them bowed to the man waiting with an odd smile on his face.

The Chancellor.

It didn’t make any sense to see the Chancellor in some rusted, back-alley hole like this. It never did, but the dream went on and Kenobi and the Chancellor spoke to each other.

Sometimes Rex heard Kenobi, other times the Chancellor.

After half a dozen repetitions of the dream, he had pieced together what they were saying: first, Kenobi would say he knew what the Chancellor was.

And the Chancellor would laugh and say that he knew what Kenobi had done. He would ask Kenobi if he wanted to learn from him. Learn things no one else could teach him.

And Kenobi would say yes and lower himself into a kneel, head bowed.

The worst part of the dream followed, the part that made Rex’s jaw clench every time he awoke gasping in his bunk. The Chancellor would lift his hand, focused entirely on Kenobi, and give an absent-minded wave to dismiss Rex and Fives to return to the little ship. But he never got any further than that.

Because Rex and Fives would shoot him in the chest at a nod from Kenobi where he knelt, blaster pistols hidden beneath the robes they wore. One shot at full power, the other a stun bolt. Rex could never tell who shot which bolt, but it didn’t matter.

They had shot the Chancellor, the leader of the Republic, the symbol of everything they fought for.

The Chancellor would fall to his knees, still alive somehow despite the smoking hole in his clothes and the distinct smell of burned flesh: suddenly a monster, snarling and inhuman, a creature unlike anything Rex had ever seen.

 _It’s good we shot him_ , Rex thought in the dream as he recoiled from the growling, yellow-eyed thing on the ground.

 _He doesn’t deserve to live_ , Fives said just before Rex woke in a confused panic.

 _But he will_ , he always heard himself answer in a strange voice not quite his own, the last echo of the dream shivering through him as he lay panting in his bunk.


	3. Shadows

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heads up, there's going to be another chapter after this so this is not the last one. Hope you enjoy!

Kix stood in the dim remains of what had once been a mess hall, the long tables shoved in haphazard arcs against the walls and covered in drifts of flimsiplast and medical equipment. The only illumination came from lamps embedded in the walls, running on the dull yellow of an emergency circuit. _There’s never enough damn light in here_ , he wanted to grumble, but he knew where every tool and datapad lay in the mess. There was no need to go looking for the breaker overrides.

There were so many other things to do.

Kenobi had sent for him a few weeks ago? A month? Two? Time had slipped into something broken up by brief lulls of sleep and meals on the bright decks overhead: unreal, fluorescent interruptions that felt more like dreams than his waking hours in this strange place.

 _What_ am _I doing?_ he wondered, digging through a particularly tall pile of notes.

 _Checking toxicity specs on neuro-stimulant interactions,_ he immediately answered himself with a dry grunt of a chuckle.

_No… what am I doing here?_

The thing hanging from the wall behind him gibbered, more animated than usual this early in what Kix’s comm said was the morning.

“Shut up,” he muttered over his shoulder, squinting down in the orange light at the pages of flimsiplast he had pulled free. _Yeah, it’s about time, I think._

When Kenobi had first approached Kix with the assignment of a special project down on the restricted deck, a challenge of the sort Kix had never seen before, Kix had been pleased and proud Kenobi had chosen him.

The thing had looked human, then. A little worse for the wear, sure, but Kix had seen far more gruesome injuries on the battlefield in his time with the 501st.

Now he turned and considered the warped shape, as fascinated as he always was by the strength of the body and mind when it came to survival.

Kenobi had given him only one objective: keep the prisoner alive, by any means necessary, until Kenobi declared him no longer needed. Requested equipment appeared overnight, some of it still bloody from use in the main medbays somewhere overhead. Datapads and supplies followed, whatever Kix asked for provided within a day or two.

It hadn’t seemed that difficult at first to do what Kenobi was asking. Sure, this sentient had come to Kix blinded, shot at least once from the looks of it, and with his tongue removed. The only noteworthy item was the pair of Force binders around his wrists. Likely a bastard Separatist higher up, Kix had told himself with an odd chill of satisfaction, and it wasn’t as if Kenobi was telling Kix to kill him.

The opposite, actually. He was telling Kix to do what he always wanted to do. Fix people. Fix things.

That first day, Kix had set the prisoner up with monitoring equipment, injected painkillers, strapped him to a gurney, and once brain waves showed the sedative had put the subject completely under, gone up to get some food and rest. He had been disappointed at how easy this project was, but he didn’t say a word to anyone as per Kenobi’s instructions as he stopped by his barracks for sleep, a shower and some trash talk with his brothers over dinner.

That disappointment had lasted no longer than the ride back down. When he used the lift code Kenobi had given him and stepped into the darkened hallway of the restricted deck, the first thing he became aware of was a high keening.

Battle instincts overrode everything else, Kix’s body perfectly still while his brain rushed to place the sound. Artillery shell? Blaster fire?

It wasn’t either of those things, and he cautiously walked forward, through the doors that opened for him and down the twisting maze of half-repaired halls.

The prisoner was no longer on the gurney, Kix saw as soon as he entered his makeshift medbay. The gurney lay snapped in half, shoved into a far corner, and broken glass and metal lay scattered like gold around the room.

“What in the first hell…?” Kix took a step in, boots crunching on the debris, toward the high-pitched squeal coming from the back wall of the room.

Kenobi stood there, his back to Kix and arms out. Something was happening in the shadows before Kenobi. Over him, in time to the slow, thoughtful movements of his hands.

Horror overwhelmed Kix. He took a step back, looking up at the ghastly work occupying Kenobi’s attention and unable to process what he saw.

What had been the human was stretching impossibly tall, impossibly flat, woven against the rough framework of another gurney slammed forcibly into the metal paneling of the wall. Bone and muscle twisted in grotesque lines around and away from each other, and as Kenobi turned to Kix he caught a glimpse of what remained of the thing’s face, raw and red with its mouth stretched in a breathless scream.

The keening faded to rasping, hissing breaths as the awful movement outward of its body stopped, leaving Kix to stare while Kenobi studied him with an impassive expression marred only by the shadows of the room.

It was better to think of it as a thing rather than a patient or even a combatant, Kenobi quietly told him, and Kix had listened. It was better to listen to Kenobi. _He knows best_ , Kix thought at the time, and he still did.

Kix had an unshakable, soul-deep conviction that this thing was evil, even if he didn’t know exactly why.

This thing deserved whatever Kenobi wanted to do to it.

But all this time later the work was getting tedious. Kenobi would send Kix out every few days to have one-sided, whispered conversations with the incoherent creature, and sometimes Kix would come back to find its limbs and body even more distorted, stretching like a web of sinew and flesh, tubes and needles, toward the corners of the wall. The challenges to keep it breathing, to keep it living, would increase, and it was hard to resist the myriad and distinct puzzles it presented Kix with.

But the thing was dying. It had been for a few days now, its body at a point where the drugs needed to keep it alive were reaching toxic levels anyway.

Kix commed Kenobi to come down without looking away from the gruesome tapestry of flesh and bone and the unconscious twitching of its mouth. “Sir, I think it’s got a few more hours at most,” he said with a nod toward it once Kenobi had joined him, the two of them standing side by side and gazing up into the blackness that hung over the mess hall.

“Such a shame. I would have liked this to last a bit longer,” Kenobi murmured. “But I have learned what I needed during my interrogations. And you have done excellent work, Kix. I appreciate your diligence.”

“Thank you for the chance, sir,” he said. “Will I be returned to the battlefield after this?”

Kenobi cast a thoughtful eye over to him, a spark of gold hazy in the gloom. “Would you like to go back to the battlefield?”

“Yes, sir. I need more to fix.”

“I suppose you do, don’t you?” Kenobi squeezed his shoulder. “I agree I may have kept you down here too long. But why don’t we leave this little lab set up for you? In case you would like to conduct any experiments yourself?”

Kix blinked, surprised. “Thank you, sir. But, well, where would I get the… materials?”

“We run across plenty of Separatist scum in battles. Even more in the sympathizer colonies we’ve begun targeting. I don’t think anyone would miss a few of those bastards, would they?”

“No, not at all,” Kix nodded, already lost in thought of what he would do differently the next time. _I’ve learned so much already that I never would have up with the ship medics. Wound care. Infection. Fractures._

_They’re as eager as I am to learn, I know, but ship brothers don’t have the stomach for this kind of thing. Not like we battle medics do._

_Not yet_ , _anyway_ , Kix decided as Kenobi urged him to go rest, telling him he would take care of the thing’s disposal himself. _But they’ll get stronger. Like me._

_We just want to help. To fix things._

 

* * *

 

Cody was dreaming. _I have to be._ He was in a dim hall, and the red light was somewhere up ahead of him, the red light that had haunted all of the men even as it had become their most revered portent.

“I have something to show you,” Kenobi was telling him and the handful of others standing around him.

There had been another battle the day before, mortar shells beautiful clouds of ash detonating across the land below, the frantic and beloved rhythm of battle jolting across tightlines and ghost-blue screens as Cody, Rex, and all of their men descended in violent fury upon their latest target.

This was a mining outpost, a production complex, and Kenobi’s orders had been very specific.

First, there was the usual command of the Council, delivered through Kenobi, that no quarter be given to the enemy. It had been a standard order for almost a year as they drifted through the edges of known space: it would not to do leave survivors to warn others of the Resolute and Negotiator’s presence and movements among the barren spread of the Outer Rim. There were no back-up plans, no reinforcements, no help this far out if the enemy found them.

The second order for this attack had been an intriguing exception that made Cody’s planning for the battle more difficult than usual. The main factories were to be cleared out room to room by ground troops. No air assaults were allowed on industrial areas for this particular mission, and there was to be as little damage to factories’ equipment and machines as possible.

Kenobi had fought at the head of the men as he always did, the first to run into fire, the most ruthless of all of them as he cut through enemies and droids with the blue line of ice that was rumored among the clones to be Skywalker’s saber rather than his own. There was a growing bloodlust to Kenobi that the brothers respected, because it was the same that ran hot in their own veins. Cody and Rex were no different, fighting back grins under their helmets as they followed Kenobi into the chaos of the fight.

The day had passed as the best ones did, combat and adrenaline and the satisfaction only battle could bring them. It was what the brothers had been made for: wasn’t that what Kenobi had told Cody once?

The mission, just 48 hours ago, felt like another lifetime as Cody now walked toward the faint, ominous glow of that red light, deep inside the maze of the half-lit deck he had never gone into before. Kenobi had summoned him so late into the night it took Cody a minute to wake up enough to answer the comm buzzing next to his bunk.

Rex was with him here in the dark. And Fives. And Kix. And a few others Cody knew, all of them lost in shadow. The last turn had taken them into a long, silent corridor stretching forward into utter blackness, lit only by the sickly red light somewhere toward the end of it. Looking around as they walked on, leaving the emergency lighting behind, Cody realized everyone in the group was all from the 501st save himself, their blue armor shaded a bruised violet by the deepening gloom.

No one spoke as Kenobi lead them onward until only his silhouette remained against the weak halo of crimson far ahead. Cody focused on Kenobi’s back, on the sweep of his robe and the dignified line of his shoulders, refusing to give into the fear tightening his stomach.

Eventually the light showed as a rough spill against a wall, marking the end of the hallway, and Kenobi turned to enter whatever room the light was in. For a moment the spill of red was blocked, the corridor plunged into merciful and total night.

 _Run_ , something whispered in Cody’s gut, and the way the others hesitated he knew the same urge ran sharp and ugly through them. But then Kenobi passed fully into the room and the crimson light flickered back into view, a soft sigh of both fear and relief passing through all of the clones.

Cody was one of the first to step inside, throat dry and skin crawling, but all he could see was a small, bright red rectangle of light radiating through the total darkness they were submerged in. His eyes struggled to adjust to the blackness as the others joined him, spreading out with puzzled, fearful tilts of their heads.

Shapes began to appear as Cody’s eyes strained to adjust to the glare: Kenobi standing silently off to the side of the light, the folds of his clothes edged in crimson. The dull shadows of storage crates rose up all around them, the quality of the air and the sound of their boots suggesting they were in a storage hall or hangar of some kind.

There was a smell in the air, a bitter tang that Cody could almost name, and as he studied the silhouettes he tried to understand what he was seeing. Kenobi seemed to be standing next to a platform or container of some kind that lay waist-high with a huge, bulky slab set flat atop it. The slab bore the small rectangle of red light along its side, the gleam steady and unforgiving and somehow no less terrifying than it had been in the brothers’ dreams.

“Come closer,” Kenobi whispered to Cody or someone else or all of them, he didn’t know.

Rex took the first step, Cody right beside him, and just before they reached the light Cody placed the scent hanging in the cool air all around them.

_Carbonite._

He looked down at the slab he stood in front of, confused. A red light on the control panel of a carbonite block meant the same red lights did anywhere. A failure. Whatever product had been transported in this particular block had been broken somehow along the way.

Lines began to swim up out of the dark as his eyes grew used to the unnerving light, and Cody frowned as his mind tried to make sense of what he was seeing. The shadows cast by the red glow across the slate hinted at shoulders and a face with closed eyes.

_That doesn’t make any sense. Living beings in stasis always register green on the panel to show vital signs. Red would mean whoever this was somehow died after freezing…_

_Or_ … Cody realized as he leaned closer, unable to stop himself. _Or_ _there were no vital signs when the freezing took place._

He knew what he would see, horror rising, but he couldn’t look away as the lines of the face sharpened through the blackness, the rough edging of the carbonite not enough to obscure the corpse’s perfectly preserved features.

_Skywalker._


	4. Voices

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another chapter, still not the last one... hope you like it!

“How? Why would you...” someone whispered. Echo, maybe. Cody couldn’t look away from Skywalker, mesmerized by the sight of him again after all this time.

The others came closer, hands running along the edge of the carbonite in a daze, Rex the only one brave enough to touch the frozen rise of Skywalker’s chest. “You kept him from the fire,” Rex said, staring down at the cold stone his hand lay against.

It was a mix of accusation and thanks, the words as stunned as they all felt.

“I did. I was lost in grief,” Kenobi agreed, touching the cool lines of Anakin’s face, his golden eyes falling out of sight as he looked down. “I only knew I could not give him up. It was not his time.”

“How?” Cody asked, unsure he wanted to know the answer.

“It was so easy with the carbonite pits lying just below where I slept those first nights, entire floors empty save a few workers with weak minds. It was no more difficult to bring him back, given the chaos between the workers and our men in packing up all of the supply crates onto the ships.”

“Who did you send to the fire in his place?” Rex asked, unwilling to look up from the cool planes of Skywalker’s chest.

“A brother already gone, CT-1449 according to his armor. One of the brave dead that fell with Anakin. One that had lain in that awful room with him. I gave him the honor of meeting the witch of the dead in Anakin’s place.”

He traced the fine plane of Anakin’s throat, continuing to speak to the motionless form that lay heaviest of all the shadows around them. “You see? How could I not do it once the idea had come to me, once I saw how easy it would be?”

“This is sick,” Fives spat, pointing at the red light that still held them all in an uneasy thrall. “He died. He’s not coming back.”

Kenobi smiled up at him as if he didn’t hear the disgust in his voice, head tilted. “There are so many mysteries in the universe, Fives. So many things you don’t know.”

Cody pulled Fives back in a silent reminder to stay calm. “Sir…” The room seethed with tension, the entire world balanced atop the fine, fragile layer of ice in the air. “You need to tell us what all of this is. Why you brought us here to see… him.”

“I will. And if you do not find it acceptable, I will allow you to arrest me. To take me back to Coruscant.”

Cody frowned even as an impossible relief washed through him, keeping his hand tight on Fives’ shoulder. _He only offers surrender to anyone when he knows he is going to win. And, I… I want him to win. I want him to be right._

He closed his eyes, blocking the awful sight of Skywalker and Rex’s conflicted face above it, and listened to the soothing rhythm of Kenobi’s voice.

“The Dark called to me, or rather those that come from it. Their voices circled around me in the days following Anakin’s death. I wanted to chase them away, but they brought comfort to the blackness of my thoughts. My anger, my sorrow, fell into their depths and came back stronger. Pure, in a way. I did not know how to speak to those that dwell in the Dark then. But when we found Dooku, oh, I began to learn.”

Cody opened his eyes to find Kenobi’s gaze steady on Fives. “You were there, Fives, even if you did not truly understand what happened when I dismembered the dear Count. A miracle happened, you see.”

Fives shifted under Cody’s hand, shaking it off with a curse that suggested he felt more guilt about keeping the ghoulish act a secret than at the fact he had allowed it to happen.

“Aliyar inde,” Rex murmured beside him after a long moment, and the others followed, whispering the clone slang into the shadows around them with the weight of the ritual it was. _It passes over me unknown._ The phrase meant Fives was forgiven for what he had done, for not telling them, and his shoulders slumped with relief as everyone fell back into silence.

Kenobi studied the men around him, a satisfied flick of gold from one to another before returning to Fives. “They care for you. As do I. You will see by the end what I mean.”

He continued, quiet and thoughtful, as Fives lowered his head in submission. “In those first insane hours after Anakin’s death, I knew, more than anything, that Anakin was not meant to die on that field. But I had lost him all the same.”

“We felt the same, sir,” Cody admitted, touching the slab once again. “We all did.”

Kenobi nodded, almost to himself, fingers sliding over the grey made crimson in the weak light. “When we found Dooku, I gave in to my anger and hatred, to the things I had been raised to turn away from my whole life. And I was rewarded. Dooku showed me, before he died, that there was another Sith more powerful than him. A true master of their arts, one who knew things hidden away in the Dark. Secrets no one else did.”

Kix’s unsteady voice drifted up from the back. “You found this other Sith, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did,” Kenobi smiled. “He taught me so many things before he died. Including what it would take to cheat death.”

The words sank into the shadows around them, over them. No one moved. Cody closed his eyes, feeling the world beginning to tip, swaying dangerously over the ice of those words. _One of them will stop this. One of them will tackle him and we’ll subdue him and return to Coruscant like we should have done months ago._

But no one did. Not Cody. Not any of the others.

Kenobi stroked Skywalker’s cheek with one thumb, gathering his thoughts. “The night Sidious died, I reached out to the Dark as I never had before, with my mind and soul open.”

“What is the Dark?” someone murmured with the same uncertainty Kix had spoken with. “None of the generals ever talk about it, I’ve heard.”

“That’s because Jedi do not understand the Dark. I learned that too from the Sith Lord. They think the Dark is an unthinking current of the Force, cruel and hungry by its very nature, and that if you speak of it you draw it to yourself. They are wrong. As they are about so many things.”

Kenobi glanced up at them, yellow eyes amber in the red light as he walked around to them, hand trailing along the slab. “I have learned the Dark is more like a place, full of entities that are as conscious as you and I. They keep the balance between worlds. And if you know how to enter where they dwell, how to speak to them, they will not harm you. They will tell you the truth as those who follow the Light never will.”

An image washed over Cody, faint and ghostlike, and he wondered if it drifted over the rest of the brothers as well.

He was walking through a night without stars, unnatural shapes rising around him. This was not anywhere in the galaxy he came from, and fear rose despite the sole wisp of the memory Kenobi had allowed into his mind _._

He was next to Kenobi in this vision, the general a cloaked form walking forward with purpose. With no sense of time or scale, they approached and passed sights Cody could barely comprehend. Slithering coils of a black serpent so large it disappeared into the night overhead with its head unseen. A distorted form long and thin that shuffled out of the darkness to whisper in Kenobi’s ear before he waved a hand and sent it scuttling back out of sight. Others that defied description, silent as they lurked or stalked or shambled alongside Kenobi before falling away.

 _Please, no more_ , Cody begged as he realized Kenobi was approaching something new, a narrow, shivering tear in space itself. _Don’t make me look at it!_ His heart, already beating fast, now thumped so hard inside his chest it almost hurt. _Please!_

 _Do not worry, Cody,_ Kenobi answered from outside of the memory, though a strange echo sounded at his name, as if the other clones were hearing their own in its place. _You are safe, and I will not make you experience this to the depth that I did. But it is important you understand. This is the only way to make sure you do._

“We know what you have come for,” the void hissed, the suggestion of movement inside it. “We have heard your question, made in blood and pain.”

Kenobi knelt in the gritty sand of this nightmare world, head down. “Is he here?”

Silence stretched out, the void glimmering sinuous and beautiful in a way that reminded Cody of the black maw of open space. “He is.”

“Is it true, what you have told me in my visions? That the Jedi lie, and that the dead all come here to the Dark?” Kenobi whispered, breathless.

“Yes.” There was a cruel smugness to the word, something wrong with it, but Cody could not focus on it any more clearly than he could the thing itself.

“I want him back.”

“We know this too. But it is not an easy task.”

“There must be sacrifice, you have told me,” Kenobi said, voice shaking as he fought to maintain consciousness against the horror before him.

“Yes. The one you seek was a favored child of the Light. Radiant. He is precious to us. It will take so many smaller lights to equal him. So many lives you will need to offer to us in trade. And even more, an unceasing river, to keep him with you and out of our grasp.”

“It will be done, I swear it. No matter the number, they will be yours.”

“Good. We wish for many.” A hunger writhed in the blackness, one that made Cody’s stomach turn.

“Promise me.”

“When you have proven yourself worthy, we will give you what you want.”

Kenobi’s head lifted as the void glimmered and deepened, Cody’s as well as he followed the movement.

An unmistakable silhouette stood back far enough inside no more detail could be seen, lines of black that hinted at soft waves of hair and a strong, proud bearing.

“Anakin,” Kenobi and Cody whispered together, the wave of Kenobi’s heartbreak and love curling his hands into fists.

The shadow stepped back out of sight as the void rushed back up over it, an awful ocean of ink swirling before Kenobi.

“Let me see him. Please!”

“We of the Dark keep our promises. Keep yours. Go.”

The vision scattered in jagged lines, raking across Cody’s mind as they dissipated. He leaned forward, hands tight on a cool surface it took him a minute to process as the carbonite slab, breaths coming quick and shallow.

One of the other men was hyperventilating, another whimpering into his hands from the muffled sound of it. Kix was already walking in careful steps around the small group, checking on each of them with whispered concern before moving to the next, and Cody joined him, getting everyone who needed help back on their feet as they struggled to calm themselves.

Rex grabbed the arm Cody offered and stood up, jaw clenched and face pale even in the red light as he turned to Kenobi with a snarl. “You knocked out the main comm yourself. You’ve kept us out here in the middle of nowhere fighting for, what, a year now? Killing for that… that thing. How many of our targets weren’t even Separatist sympathizers, like you told us?”

“Captain, you know better. All of you chose to fight. Any of you could have questioned me, stopped me at any time. And yet none of you did. You were happy to fight. It is in your blood. It is who you were made to be.”

“We…” Rex sputtered, but Kenobi’s calm, measured words had snapped the brittle line of his fury, of the brothers’ anger, leaving only scattered doubt and confusion in its place. “We…”

“Are soldiers. The best soldiers, whose lives were designed to be short. Because those that made you, and those that use you, fear you.”

Kenobi stood taller, as Cody had seen him do so many times at the end of a negotiation, wreathed in crimson and black. “Continue to give me enough power to win back Anakin, to keep him with me. We will be capable of great things. Terrible things. The Dark has told me that together Anakin and I will be able to stop your bodies from aging. You will be able to fight, to live in glory, forever more.”

No one spoke, Kenobi’s words flowing elegant and reassuring through the dark. “Think about it. Who better to ask the witch to stay her hand than Anakin? Than the one who saw her face and returned to you, whole and pure?”

“Who would we fight?” Fives asked with more curiosity than he could hide as he leaned against Echo, both still weak from the vision.

“Anyone. The Separatists, who have killed your brothers. The Republic, who bought you and use you like pack animals. The scientists who made you. Anyone you like. War and battle and honor until you die in a fight you chose to be in, rather than in a war that was thrust upon you.”

Rex ran a hand over his face, eyes distant and voice hesitant. He was doing the same thing as Cody, Cody knew, the same thing as every other man standing in that vast, darkened room. He was considering what Kenobi had said, just enough to let the idea slip in past the horror of it. “What about our brothers? In the other battalions?”

“When Anakin has come back and we have freed all of you from the chains you were born with, there is nothing to say we could not free them one ship at a time. Bring them out here into the wilderness and give them the chance to join us once they understand what we are offering them.”

“They won’t understand,” Kix said, shaking his head. “They’re not… like us.”

“But they will be once they see,” Kenobi answered with a gentle patience. “All in time, gentlemen. For now, let us continue as we have. We are close to bringing Anakin back. I can sense it. And when we have, we will tell the brothers of the freedom Anakin and I will bring. I think they will welcome it, don’t you?”

 _Freedom_ , Cody wondered, the word carrying a new, indescribable weight. It floated over all of them, bright and surreal in this macabre place. He was trying to understand how he felt and what to say when the words came to him, unbidden and heavy with emotion.

“Aliyar inde,” he nodded, sliding his hand onto Kenobi’s shoulder as the others echoed the phrase with quiet awe. _You are forgiven for what you have done._

Kenobi bowed in return, as solemn as they were.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So yeah, I've given up saying when this will be over, but I have an end in mind, I swear! Thank you for all your comments so far and your patience with my ongoing illness that has kept me from writing and being here more. Y'all are awesome and I really, really do appreciate the comments and kudos. <3


	5. Light

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here it is, the end of Miasma! Hope you like it and thanks for reading and your comments and kudos along the way! <3 <3 <3

Obi-Wan sat atop the gentle rise of a hill, wrapped in a thick blanket that would have been the standard bed-roll grey if the light were better. Everything was still and bathed in the amber of sunset, from the hills around him to the rocky plain below, and the cool air and dry waves of grass he sat in marked the season as fall despite the lack of trees anywhere in sight.

This place was familiar, and it only took a moment to remember when and where this was.

_This was one of the days after the Dakrenn campaign while we were waiting for new orders. Anakin and I sat here together, watching the sun go down across the hills._

_It was the first time we shared how we felt about each other._

_We were like teenagers, nervous and shy, and couldn’t even look at each other at first._

**_Master…_** a voice called, too faint to place.

 _I’m dreaming_ , he realized with a smile as soft as their first kiss had been, not daring to glance to the side. _My dear one will be sitting right beside me_ , _with that same giddy look on his face. And he’ll lean over and put his head on my shoulder, and we’ll sit that way until the stars come out._

The plains below were streaked orange and indigo as they had been that evening, long streamers of darkness laid out behind the scattered boulders and rocks and stretching toward the hill Obi-Wan sat on.

A weight settled against his shoulder, just as he thought it would.

“Hello, Master.”

“Hello, Anakin,” he whispered, throat tight at the lovely curls of hair brushing his neck. “Hello, my beautiful boy.”

“I’ve missed you, Master,” came the whisper back. “So much.”

**_Master, listen! Please!_ **

Obi-Wan frowned at the cry as it ghosted along the edge of his mind. It couldn’t be Anakin. Anakin was right next to him. “Do you hear…”

“That’s nothing, Master. Don’t listen to it.”

He felt the smooth leather of Anakin’s gloved hand twine with his own, and at the touch tears blurred his vision. Wiping them away, he squeezed Anakin’s hand and let his gaze fall to the land below them, not daring to look directly at him for fear the dream might end.

There was something off about the plain. He wasn’t sure what it was, but it gave him something to study as Anakin continued.

“I’m so proud of you. What you’ve done.”

“I would do anything for you, Anakin.”

The comforting weight shifted against his shoulder as Anakin nuzzled against Obi-Wan’s neck, lips warm against the skin there as he spoke. “I know, Master.”

**_Don’t listen! You have to--_ **

Startled, Obi-Wan realized what was strange about the view. The shadows of the distant rocks were too long for the angle of the sun, creeping well past where they should have ended.

“Do you see that?” he asked in a daze, pointing down the slope. “The shadows…” They were moving toward the two of them, crawling out of time with the sinking sun.

“Yes, Master. Let’s sit and wait for them.” Anakin’s hand tightened in his, voice low and close and soothing. “Don’t you want to wait for them?”

“Yes,” he said, fascinated. “I--”

Something knocked Obi-Wan away, a desperate swell of the Force, and when he sat back up in terror he saw that Anakin had disappeared.

“Anakin! Anakin!” Obi-Wan cried, but before he could get up another wave of the Force slammed him down into the sea of withered grass.

**_MASTER!_ **

Anakin was there again, clutching Obi-Wan’s shoulders hard enough it stung even through the blanket and his tunic. Not the Anakin he had been sitting with: this one leaned down over him, sobbing and anguished, a translucent shadow despite the strength of his grip.

The indigo sky overhead bled through him, but not enough to conceal the torture in his eyes.

**_Please Obi-Wan stop you have to stop what have you done what have--_ **

Obi-Wan sat up with a rough cry into the cool darkness of his room, Anakin’s agonized face and frantic cries all around him.

The panicked tones of that voice rung in his head: so much sorrow and misery. So much disappointment.

“Trick… trick of the Light,” Obi-Wan muttered, clutching his head and curling his fingers tight into his hair until it hurt. “The Light’s trying to stop me but it can’t. Anakin would never look at me like that. Say things like that. Anakin wants to come back to me. I know he does.”

He took a long, shaking breath, hands sliding down over his face as he fought back the horrible ending of the dream. “I will never be a slave to the Light again. Neither will he. We’ll be free of it. We’ll be together.”

He sat in the gloom, whispering that to himself again and again as angry, desperate tears trailed warm and slow down his cheeks.

 

* * *

 

A few weeks later Cody stood next to Rex in the emptiness of an unused hangar bay, watching out through the vast sweep of nanoscreen shielding as supply barges from a dock higher up drifted out of sight. The ships were on their way down to the latest target, a tightly clustered set of factories on a small, barren moon circling an equally barren world.

For every few raids they did on outposts, an equally small industrial base would be chosen for repairs and raw materials. Most of the action was over at this one, and the smaller vessels set off at an unhurried descent to the ragged grey of the mountain ranges below.

“How’s clean up going?” Rex asked. They had stood together in peaceable silence since Cody had arrived, hands clasped behind their backs as they watched the hypnotic drift of vessels and planet from the hangar entrance.

“Ahead of schedule. Tomorrow’s the final sweep. Door to door through the storage complex.”

Unlike the frantic pace of the war they had left behind, the brothers could take the time they needed on these stops: between the remoteness of their targets and the guerrilla missions to knock out comm equipment before the main assault, there was never any real threat of a rescue party or even a random visitor coming to anyone’s aid.

Rex nodded. “So what do you think they’ll say it was this time? By the time anyone gets out here?”

Cody snickered at the question, watching a ship drift by in silver and reflected sunlight. “Some idiotic guess. Just like they always do.”

Both of them took particular pride in the fact no one seemed to have ever gotten out word of them. Every isolated target, Separatist settlements or otherwise, had been caught off guard every time they showed up. Rumors were starting to spread, from what Kix happened to hear from the sentients he requested from each attack, but with no survivors left to tell the truth people were making blind guesses based on the destruction left behind.

_Judgement from the local god. Ghost ships from the oldest stories. A new fleet of pirates._

_Simple ideas from simple people._

Cody knew this pride at the meticulousness of their operations spread down all the way through the ranks and through each man on their ships. The brothers were slowly becoming the same in the way they thought and acted, down to the red line painted down the side of troop helmets that had spread to the collars of techs and medics.

There was constant excitement now, anticipation of the next battle and endless guessing and rumors as to where it would be. Cody grinned at each question he was asked in the mess halls or during training, sometimes giving subtle hints and sometimes wild lies everyone laughed at.

He was fascinated at how often Kamino came up alongside major Separatist planets as possible eventual targets even though no one but a handful knew of Skywalker and the promises Kenobi had made.

 _They’re wolves_ , Cody thought, looking down from the view of the moon to the form lying half-obscured inside carbonite. _As sharp as a pack of Koris wolves. They know something is coming even if they don’t know exactly what._

_We all do. There’s something changing around us, something powerful._

“How’d you find me?” Rex asked with a grin, glancing over with the same faint yellow eyes Cody had seen in his own mirror for weeks.

“Followed the smell.”

“Yeah, yeah, kark you too.”

“So why’d he want Skywalker moved up here?”

“Kenobi said it’ll happen soon. That.” Rex gestured at the carbonite, smile fading. “Said he wanted a place big enough for medics to set up properly in without everyone in the ship seeing him on the way to the med bay.”

Skywalker’s features stood out much clearer now in the reflected light of the moon, eyes closed and face unnaturally slack. The indicator below glowed the same terrible and fascinating crimson it always had, and both of them contemplated it for a long while, the only sound the air recyclers hissing somewhere far overhead, before Rex spoke again.

“Do you remember the tree? Test 14, in the white room?”

Cody shrugged, surprised at the new direction of the conversation. “14. The climbing test. Yeah.” The memory came back to him, a room wide and so tall the huge tree that sat in the middle of it was lost high among bright, harsh lights.

It was the first live plant Cody had ever seen as a beginning cadet outside of holos and training materials. That was the actual test, he had figured years later, the ability of a young mind to adjust to the unexpected.

Alone with this alien, massive thing towering over him in whispering green, the instructions had been given over an intercom in the same crisp, clear voice all of their makers seemed to have.

“Climb to the third large branch up, they told me,” Cody recalled. “They told us all that, I heard a long time later.”

“They told me that too. I remember lining up outside the room with the rest of my group and us going in one by one. We didn’t know what was coming because they sent us out another exit when we finished.”

Unsure why Rex had brought up something from so long ago, Cody tried to think back. “Yeah, my group too. When I got up to the third branch, there was a treat there. One of the little blue candies we got at that age when we memorized how to strip one of the weapons or something like that.” He paused, the clinical scent of the room slowly coming back to him. “But when I got there no one said anything through the intercom, and I figured I was supposed to take the candy and climb down.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t, did you?”

Cody shook his head, no less puzzled. “No... I almost did, but I looked up, and I started climbing again. I wanted to see what was at the top before they made me leave.”

“Me too. I told you, right? That’s how I ended up getting promoted even if unofficially. I outperformed expectations, they told me.”

“Yeah. All of us commanders climbed to the top, now that I think about it,” Cody noted, carefully reviewing in his mind what the others had told him out in the field. “Wolffe, Bly. Creative thinking, they told us later, the will to keep going even if there was no clear reward.”

Rex folded his arms before he continued, voice unreadable. “After every few tests, we were mixed into new little groups. But 14 is one of the only tests that really sticks in your mind, right? Who was in your group right beforehand and the new cadets you were mixed in with after.”

“Yeah, 14 is one of the only ones I really remember,” Cody admitted, even as he frowned in agreement as he realized what Rex’s point was. “We were around the same as standard eight years then, I think. Good little lab animals, weren’t we?”

Rex turned to face him with a grim smile. “Got another question for you.”

“Yeah?”

“Have you ever met someone who didn’t make it up the tree? Who failed 14?”

Cody opened his mouth to answer ‘yes’, but closed it again as he thought about it. No one was allowed to talk to each other about any of the myriad of tests they went through until they went into the field. Some Cody had eventually shared training stories with had been slow up the tree, some had gotten splinters, and some claimed to have done it in record time or gotten two pieces of candy. “... No.”

“A few boys fell a lot in the climbing exercises before that, going up those plain white nets in the endurance halls, didn’t they?”

“Yeah. They weren’t in my own group but there were always a couple when we all got together for the morning trainings.”

“Did you ever see them after 14?”

Cody hesitated, an awful feeling growing that had nothing to do with Skywalker’s still form laid out before them. “No. I never thought to look for them, honestly.”

“Yeah, you had no reason to. You and yours were designed to be the best of the best,” Rex said without any anger, gaze steady on him. “Those at my level weren’t. I’ve been thinking about that a lot recently. Out of twelve of us in my group that went into 14, I never saw two of them again. Anywhere. Even though all our new little groups were in the same general training circles, same barrack complexes, same mess halls.”

Unease sharpened into something nameless and cold as Cody began to understand what Rex’s point had really been all along. “What happened to them?”

“It took a while to remember their numbers, and then a few more hours searching through our full roster database. It hasn’t been updated since we left Mid-Rim space, but it doesn’t matter.”

Rex turned back to the view, words brittle. “Each number was marked ‘decommissioned’ a long time ago. Both on the same date.”

Cody turned as well, the two of them looking once again out into space and yellow eyes narrowed, lost in memories of other tests, of later losses in the field against their enemies and under the control of the Republic.

“I offered to stay by Skywalker during clean up tomorrow. Had a feeling,” Rex finally said. “Kenobi agreed.”

Cody gave a slow nod of approval. “I’m leading the operation from command. You want Kix or anyone here with you?”

“No. I’ll comm if the situation changes. Kenobi going down with the boys?”

“Yeah.”

Rex considered this with a solemn, distant expression. “Good. That’s good.”

 

* * *

 

After that first dream of sitting with Anakin at dusk and the horrible way it ended, Obi-Wan’s dreams had shifted abruptly to ones far more comforting.

But there was still a skewed tilt to them, something that seemed off every time.

In one dream they lay on bed rolls pushed together, as they often did when they slept in the field, but as they whispered and shared quiet, loving words a shadow circled them just out of sight. In another, he and Anakin were in a beautifully appointed room, laughing about something long forgotten, but something lurked outside the windows, a faint shape standing with a hand pressed against the window.

Every time Obi-Wan noticed anything strange, Anakin would pull his attention back to him with a gentle word or touch, and the uneasiness he felt would fade away.

Last night’s dream had been particularly clear, Anakin curled against him in the dark, Obi-Wan’s arms warm and heavy with the weight of his dear one relaxed in sleep. There had been nothing odd, nothing strange at all this time, just a dream of the two of them as they had been many times before.

Obi-Wan thought of it with a fond smile hidden under his hood as he strode through the barren hallways of the industrial complex the next morning with several squads behind him. Without slowing, he gave the occasional hand signal off to one side corridor or another as they moved further inward through the tangle of warehouses. _Two troops, go left. Multiple targets. One, go right. One target._

The faint glow of living things came to him through the Force like sunlight through mist, and his men didn’t hesitate as they broke off in the directions he sent them.

The troops had finished working through the dormitories the day before, all of the brothers faintly disgusted at how stupid people were no matter which settlement they overran. Almost everyone seemed to run right back to their living quarters, to the place they felt safest.

_To the most obvious place. Stupid, weak, undeserving of the life each of them has wasted until now._

Obi-Wan continued, saber unlit in his hand, glad these last few survivors might provide an interesting hour or so for the brothers behind him.

When they were far into the maze of the complex, only a handful of men left behind him, a sudden pull brought him to a stop. He turned, distracted, and studied one corridor stretching far off and around a corner, his men bringing weapons to the ready in clacks of metal against plating.

The long hallway sat in gloom, the automatic lights of the rest of the factory plodding along as they always had no matter what happened around them. And for Obi-Wan, there was the feeling of life as there had been all morning, but this cloud of it smoldered along the back of his mind like sparks from a fire. “Fives, do we have any men down that way?”

He continued to study the hallway, pushing out with the Force toward the light of the unseen fireflies. It almost hurt to touch, and he glared down the hall, disgusted by its strength.

“No, sir. All personal trackers are showing everyone is behind us.”

“Wait here. I will handle this myself.”

“Yes, sir.”

Obi-Wan took one cautious step and then another into the corridor, curious as he moved further in at how the lights this way had been shot out. There had been power failures evident along their way through the warehouses, patches of shadow long and dim down some paths, but someone not his own men had taken the time to shoot out each one of the overhead panels here, the damage not clear from out in the main hallway.

Unafraid, he lit his saber in a dry hiss of blue and kept walking, fascinated by the almost painful sensation of life growing in his mind. A few stacks of boxes blocked the way back, but he shoved them aside easily with the Force and turned the corner into another long, abandoned hallway.

This stretch of corridor was pitch black without the faint, faded glow coming from the entrance, and Obi-Wan pushed another scattered few crates aside with a wave of his hand. Things were beginning to make sense as a tall, open shelf came into view at the far end of the hall, the beautiful and repulsive ghost-lights still unseen but hovering somewhere just behind it.

 _The lack of lights, the boxes, the shelf…_ He lowered his saber, the blue catching on a neat arc of scoring across the bare floor. _Someone did all of this to make this seem like a dead end._

 _And it would have, to anyone but me._ He grinned as he lifted his saber to reveal the distinctive vertical line of closed door panels on the wall behind the shelf, wondering why he hadn’t come down to assist with clean up operations before. _Here are the intelligent ones, the last stand hoping to hold out until we leave. They might even have weapons._

Curious, he raised a hand to lift the shelf with the Force, just enough for him to noiselessly swing it back to the side before he set it down. _Let’s see if these men aren’t quite as worthless as the rest of them._

Taking careful steps forward, he touched the door panel and sent a brief spark of the Force through it to burn out the lock controls and trip the open key.

The door slid open to reveal the cool lighting of a small storage room: ration boxes stacked neatly in one corner, blankets scattered across the floor.

And children.

A dozen or so children, staring up at him in frightened awe.

Obi-Wan tilted his head in wonder and understanding as he took in the radiance of their Force signatures, each one rich and harsh as summer sunlight.

“Shh, little ones,” he whispered. “Shh...”

The door closed behind him.

 

* * *

 

Alone and silent, Rex had stood before the block for hours now, aware that time was passing without any concern about exactly how long it had been. There was none of the raw grief that he had guarded Skywalker with the first time back in the haze of memory, only an initial spark of excitement that faded into morbid curiosity at what Kenobi would do when he returned to find Skywalker unchanged.

 _The dead don’t come back. No one comes back from the fire_ , he had told himself, the acrid smell of carbonite lacing the air as he took a long breath and let it out. He had believed that his entire life, known no reason to doubt the one truth every clone trooper could count on.

Until a few minutes ago.

The awful red of the indicator light was gone, and Rex tried to process this fact as part of the reality he and the slab and the hangar bay occupied. There was no red glare, no matter how hard he stared at it. Only a cold, biting green that had snapped to life in its place.

 _I should tell someone_ , he thought with dazed concern, but it was impossible to look away from that green, to move beyond the thought of what it meant.

 _Cody._ Rex raised his arm, staring at the carbonite, but before he touched it the device buzzed against his arm with the encoded line he and Cody shared.

“The General wants a status update on the situation,” Cody said as soon as he appeared, his wording as vague and neutral as he could manage given the men hustling about the command center behind him. “Any changes?”

“You… could say that. It went green just now.”

Cody’s eyes widened, and Rex managed a nod through his shock as his heart started to pound with what this could mean. _With Kenobi and Skywalker, we would have a chance at a real future. We could have anything we want._

_Do anything we want._

Somehow Cody kept his voice miraculously, appropriately steady as he took a datapad from somewhere off-screen and clicked in a few orders. “The General thought there might be a change in the situation when he commed in. Wants Kix down there immediately.”

“I’ll comm him and fill him in when he gets here.”

Cody lowered his voice, disbelief threaded through it as the words ghosted across the link. “Rex, are you sure? I know this is stupid, but are you sure? Has he really…?”

“Yes.” Rex couldn’t find any other words as he stared at the massive block, and he barely heard Cody’s promise that he would be there as soon as he could before signing off. Kix arrived a brief comm message later, exhausted and in the barest attempt at proper clothing.

He crossed the wide space of the hangar speechless, drawn by the green light, and Rex felt a crazy relief that someone else was seeing it too.

The next half hour was a blur as Rex kept out of the way of the rush of medics Kix called in, trusted men that had worked closely with him in recent months. For all of the incredulous looks they gave the motionless figure, there were no questions asked, and soon a drift of machines were brought in to surround the slab. Some Rex recognized, standard heart and brain monitors and trauma kits. Others he had never seen or had only the faintest memory of before going under for surgery himself.

It all came together in another dream-like scene, an island of spindly lights and heavy white shapes. Kix, now in the same blue operating smocks as his men, was the only one speaking, giving a steady drum of orders as he directed the medics and moved around to examine their work. He spoke without looking up, fingers quick across keys and switches as he passed. “Check everything and check it again, gentlemen. I don’t want so much as a damn tray out of place.”

“Yes, sir,” came the quiet responses over the rustle of their movements and the final arrangement of cables and instruments. When Kix was satisfied, he motioned and the men moved to stand in pairs behind each station, calling out its name to show they were ready.

“Vitals.”

“Anesthetics.”

“Surgery assistance.”

“Surgeon,” Kix finished with his own role, walking to Rex and Cody with a respectful nod as he pulled gloves on.

“Once this starts and we get the patient out, we’re not moving him any more than we have to. He’ll be extremely weak, unresponsive, and will likely not even be conscious for days or longer,” Kix explained to Rex and Cody, who had just joined them with quick, loud strides across the bay. “General incoming?”

“Not yet,” Cody said, clearly lost in the green light just as Kix had first been before remembering where he was. “Clean-up’s done and everyone’s touching down in the main hangar now. ETA 15 minutes.”

“Got it,” Kix said as he returned to the block at the center of the spiral of machines with gruff approval. “Looking good, boys.”

Turning toward Rex and Cody from across from the slab and the low wall of machines, Kix gestured to the form inside it. The tension in his voice was the same they all felt, as powerful and undeniable as that of a man taking his first suit walk into the black of open space.

“We won’t lose him, I promise. But after this long in carbonite, not even taking into account the… condition… he’s been in, things are guaranteed to stay ugly for awhile. Really ugly, and I don’t know for how long. If one of you could go meet the General when he gets here and explain this before he makes it over here to Skywalker, that would help both our patient and all of us out.”

With a solemn nod of agreement from Cody, Kix tapped in the release code.

 

* * *

 

Cody watched the carbonite begin its slow, unsteady crawl down the planes and hollows of the form lying before them, the edges glowing before drifting up into nothing as it went. Kix had clearly chosen the slowest thaw setting possible, allowing him and his men time to deal with issues as they surfaced rather than all at once.

No one spoke as Skywalker’s face came into view, grey burning away in cold lines from his closed eyes and fine profile. Cody’s stomach lurched as he took in the pale hue of his skin, remembering how tan Skywalker had always been. _Was the indicator wrong?_

Kix leaned over, hand over just above Skywalker’s throat and waiting for the carbonite to reveal it.

The second it slid past Kix pressed his fingers against his neck rather than wait for a monitor. “Pulse,” he announced over the hiss of the thawing. A collective sigh went up, Cody’s among it, everyone unable to look away.

“Assessing initial trauma next,” Kix said, alerting his men to be ready. Skywalker’s chest came into view, and as soon as enough of his tunic lay free Kix moved his hand down to gently slide it into the tunic and over to the scorch mark hiding the fatal wound.

A second passed, and then another, Kix feeling around the area with a puzzled expression, searching for something he clearly couldn’t find. “Initial trauma… resolved.”

Cody shook his head, exchanging glances with Rex. They were beyond reason now, beyond any strange thing either of them had ever seen in their years criss-crossing the galaxy fighting the Separatists. The image Cody had first seen in that awful cold storage room all that time ago rose out of nowhere once again: cities vanishing under aerial bombardments, ships arcing down in brutal waves of firepower and soldiers. _War._

He wondered if Rex was seeing the same, whatever scene had come to him that terrible night, and found himself pleased to note the subtle clench of his jaw and distant look in his eyes. _He is. He sees it too._

Skywalker was almost free of the carbonite now, still and peaceful as a man asleep despite the pallor of his skin, and Kix ordered a gurney closer so they could move him over to the more permanent bed set up as soon as they could confirm his vital signs were stable.

Cody let the image slip over him, hands tightening behind his back as he saw battles stretching out before him in a lush haze of fire and chaos. _Beautiful, total war._

“Vitals are steady but low, sir. Looks like a coma at this point.”

“Best we could have hoped for,” Kix muttered, leaning back from Skywalker to make room for another man next to him. “He’s out. You here and you two on the other side. We move him in 5, 4, 3-”

Skywalker sat up.

“Master?” he asked as everyone jumped back with shouts and curses. He looked around the room with eyes as golden as Kenobi’s, past their shocked faces with a glowing, empty gaze that had no interest in or concern for them. “Where is my Master?”

Cody had flinched with all the rest of them, but it was more instinct than true surprise. He was sharing reality with the violent images growing stronger every second in his mind, Skywalker’s pale face darkened by the smoke of unseen battles.

“Anakin!” The pounding of boots echoed across the hangar toward them and cold swept through the room, though in his trance Cody couldn’t tell if it was the air vents high above or something else. It slid through him, down into his bones, and curled around them until ice was all he could feel.

Kenobi pushed his way past the stunned medics, breathless as Skywalker held his arms out to him.

“Master, there you are…” he whispered with a slow smile, tunic loose and marred by the dirt of a planet long left behind.

“Yes, I’m here,” Kenobi cried as he sank down to sit next to Skywalker. “I’m here.” He pulled Skywalker close until his face was buried against Skywalker’s chest and fingers clenched against his back.

Kenobi’s sobs of relief jarred the medics into action. Kix stumbled over his first orders before regaining his professional tone as best he could and setting each of them to a task: hydration, monitoring, clearing away the worst-case machines and equipment no longer needed.

Skywalker gave Kenobi a tender kiss out of place with the sharp gold of his eyes, but Kenobi didn’t seem to notice. In tears and fingers tracing the firm lines of Skywalker’s shoulders and the collar of his tunic, Kenobi sat back to stare at him in wonder. “You’re back…”

“Yes, isn’t that what you wanted?”

“Don’t tease me, not now,” Kenobi cried, shaking his head even as another smile crept across his face and he received its mirror in return. “My beautiful boy.”

Forgotten as the medics rushed to begin their work, Rex and Cody stood back to watch the loud, bizarre scene with the same impassive expressions they always wore. But the blood thrummed loud and hot through their veins at the thought of what lay ahead for them in a future now undeniably their own.

Cody folded his arms, silent as he imagined the army they would build. _Us. Our brothers_.

_Kenobi._

_And that thing with Skywalker’s face._


End file.
